featured book

featured book

Looking Around

A Journey Through Architecture

Format

Paperback

Price

$18.00

Paperback

ISBN 9780140168891

320 Pages

1 Dec 1993

Penguin Books

18 and up

Overview

From the opening sentences of his first book on architecture, Home, Witold Rybczynski seduced readers into a new appreciation of the spaces they live in. He also introduced us to “an unerringly lucid writer who knows how to translate architectural ideas into layman’s terms” (The Dallas Morning News). Rybczynski’s vast knowledge, his sense of wonder, and his elegantly uncluttered prose shine on every page of his latest meditation on the art of building.

Looking Around is about architecture as an art of compromise—between beauty and function, aspiration and engineering, builders and clients. It is the story of the Seagram Building in New York and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio—a museum that opened without a single painting on view, so that critics could better appreciate its design. But what of the visitors who want a building that displays art well? What of those who work in the building? Looking Around explores the notion of the architect as superstar and assesses giants from Palladio to Michael Graves, styles from classicism to high tech. It demonstrates how architecture actually works—or doesn’t—in corporate headquarters, airports, private homes, and the special buildings designed to represent our civilization.

For all its erudition, Looking Around is also bracingly straightforward. Rybczynski looks closely and critically at structures that may once have dazzled us with their ostentation and expense, and sees them as triumphs or failures—of aesthetic ideals and of lasting function. This is a fascinating and illuminating book about an art form integral to our lives.

Looking Around

Praise

“You only have to look around to see how thought-provoking these essays are.” —The New York Times

“His best work to date.” &#151The Boston Sunday Globe

Table of Contents

IntroductionI. Homes and HousesHome, Sweet Bungalow HomeGood HousekeepingThe Androgynous HomeLooking Back to the FutureIf a Chair Is a Work of Art, Can You Still Sit on It?Getting Away from It AllAs American as Blue-Jeans and Sweat ShirtsFrom Mao’s House to Our HouseHabitat RevisitedHot Housing ButtonsLiving SmallerShould Suburbs Be Designed?Our TownII. Special PlacesA Place MapArt Inside the WallsAirportsAt the MallCurious ShrinesThe Birthplace of PostmodernismA National GalleryA National BillboardA Homemade HouseIII. The Art of BuildingLittle Architects, Little Architecture“But Is It Art”?How to Pick an ArchitectFameLow-Cost ClassicismA Decade of Disorientation: 1910-19High TechWill the Real California Architecture Please Stand Up?Shaping Chicago’s FutureGod Isn’t in the Details, After AllThe Seven Implants of Postmodern ArchitectureListen to the Melody